The Mandarin Market amid the boom
The largest classroom at one of the civil service exam tutoring institution in Shenzhen can accommodate up to over 60 people at a time.
The surge in popularity of civil service exams has spawned a sizable training industry.
In 2024, the market size of China’s civil service exam training sector grew steadily to 13.5 billion yuan, and is expeced to exceed 23.7 billion yuan by 2030, indicating an overall trend of steady expansion, according to Huaon Industrial Research Institute.
Fan’s organisation initially focused only on postgraduate entrance exam training business. Later, as the civil-service exam boom took off, it also began to expand.
“If our students did not pass the postgraduate entrance exam or they are tired of studying and feel that the postgraduate entrance exam is not suitable for them, to be honest, we have already collected the tuition fee. Why would the fees be refunded?” said Fan.
Fan’s institution will encourage these students to turn to their civil service exam tutoring class instead of refunding.“Tutoring companies are profit-driven,” said Fan. “So once you pay, it’s basically not something that can be returned.”
In addition, Dong’s organization operates on a model combining direct headquarters operation and franchised branches, running both online courses and offline classes. She mentioned that around 2021, her company entered a period of expansion, and the scale of these institutions grew rapidly, reaching around a thousand branches in China.
Tutoring institutions often use large-class models as civil service exam training instructors are expensive, according to Dong.
“Experienced and influential lecturers may earn four or five thousand yuan per class,” said Dong. “The small-class model cannot support such labor costs.” Therefore, increasing student density has become a common practice to control costs. “But large classes do not mean reduced services, but will be equipped with different positions such as supervisors and teaching assistants,” she added.
Xu spent more than 20,000 yuan for the online exam tutoring, “it will give you an account, and there are many live courses in that account,” and for the interview preparation phase, Xu could send recordings of her practice to the tutors to receive feedback in the WeChat chat group.
Through offline inquiries, a six-month boarding training program offered by a civil service exam institution in Shenzhen is priced at around 30,000 yuan.
“What is actually being sold is a ‘promising future’,” said Dong. “Most of the students who enrol still lack sufficient self-discipline.”
Dong said that the the majority of students in these civil service exam classes are those people who simply follow the crowd.
“When you ask them why they are taking the exam, they cannot really give you reason. They just say things like ‘I suppose I should take it’ or ‘My parents told me to’. There are very few students who are genuinely motivated and have already mapped out their future,” she added.
“People who can pass already have the ability to do so. Whether they attend the training course or not, they can still succeed,” she said.
“It really comes down to the individual, whether they can work hard and whether they have the self-discipline to stick with it,” she added.
In mid-March, some candidates prepares for the interview stage in one of Shenzhen's tutoring institution.
The business lines of the institution are also extending towards diversification, as the tutoring institution where Dong works has launched a dating website among students.
“It was not very popular at the beginning and people mostly joked about it,” said Dong. “But in the past two years, more and more people have signed up. People find that after they start working, building a stable relationship is extremely difficult.”
“In the northern part of China, there’s an opinion that those inside the system don't marry those outside,” said Dong. “That’s why this dating platform splits people into categories such as civil servants division.
“We have big classes with over a thousand people every day, the person next to you is different every day. People meet and date here. Getting into the system isn’t easy, but dating after you’re in? That part is much easier,” said Dong.
This dating platform uses whether users are in the public sector as one of its key criteria for categorizing them.
“At least tens of thousands will come to the institution each year, leading to an extension of its business,” she said. “You can sell everything such as notebooks, online courses, printing services here, and can even open a cafe shop, run restaurants.”